The present work is a manifest to the unequivocally consummate and technically impeccable archetype of Kusama’s oeuvre - a test.mes nt to the legendary artist’s astonishing dedication to art and creation. Arguably the most important living female artist today, responsible for revolutionising Abstraction, Expression, Emotionalism, Pop Art and Minimalism, Kusama’s phenomenal oeuvre transgresses paradigms in all fields and media. Since her early days of explosive stardom creating cutting-edge avant-garde art in parallel with key figures in the male-dominated global art scene such as Andy Warhol, Donald Judd and Claes Oldenburg.

Between the 1980s and 1990s, Kusama began to incorporate pumpkins into her dot-motif paintings, drawings and prints, in line with her return to works with richer narrative content as opposed to the stark austere aesthetic of her 1960s infinity nets. Embodying an iconic, charismatic and highly personal motif, Kusama’s pumpkins are as universally emblematic of her oeuvre as the Campbell’s soup can was to Andy Warhol’s. The pumpkin is deeply central to the artist’s core psyche, stemming from a vivid hallucination from her childhood. “The first t.mes I ever saw a pumpkin was when I was in elementary school and went with my grandfather to visit a big seed-harvesting ground…and there it was: a pumpkin the size of a man’s head… It immediately began speaking to me in a most animated manner” (Infinity Net, Yayoi Kusama, trans. Ralph McCarthy, Tate Publishing, London, UK, 2011, p. 75).

Rendered in a shade of golden-orange, Kusama deliberately painted Pumpkin in the gourd’s essential colour with a direct semblance to a sweet, tender and luscious kabocha. The work is covered in precisely painted polka dots and set against a wall of tessellated nets – all of which are wholly iconic and era-defining features of the artist’s style. Developed to mature perfection through decades of near-obsessive production and reproduction, each of these distinct elements of the piece reflect a different segment within Kusama’s expansive aesthetic philosophy whilst coming together to create a dazzlingly hypnotic visual narrative – one that evokes strong associations with the formal reduction of Minimalism, the repetitive symbolism of Pop and the hypnotic illusions of Op Art. Surreal and fantastical, Kusama’s pumpkin paintings exhibit extraordinary dexterity in skill and execution as well as the single-minded meticulous vision that defines the artist’s career – all the while being deeply personal and indexical, representing a wholly epic extension of Kusama’s legacy in contemporary art and culture.

Functioning as both an allegory and a form of self-portraiture, Kusama’s pumpkin as an uncanny yet benign and nurturing subject exudes peace, serenity, life and vigour. Traditionally a symbol of fertility, the pumpkin also gives one a feeling of abundance, joy, triumph and reward – not unlike the feelings one would experience when reaping one’s harvest after an arduous season of work. In 1993, after almost two decades of a retreated presence from the international art world, Kusama was invited to be the first solo artist and first woman ever to grace the Japanese pavilion at the 45th Venice Biennale. For this momentous occasion she constructed Mirror Room (Pumpkin), consuming a section of the pavilion in an immersive floor-to-ceiling extravaganza of black-on-yellow polka dots. At its centre was a dazzling mirrored room filled with pumpkin sculptures, echoing her seminal 1966 Infinity Mirror Room—Love Forever installation whilst grandly introducing the theme of the pumpkin. The pumpkin thus stands as a symbol of triumph for the artist’s international resurgence and rise to global eminence.